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Faculty Fellow

E. Summerson Carr

Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and Department of Anthropology University of Chicago

Biography

E. Summerson Carr works between cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology to study how ideas, logics, norms and values are authorized, enacted, institutionalized, and scaled as expertise. She conducts her fieldwork in the United States, where experts influence most every aspect of contemporary life, if often in the face of significant public skepticism. Her research focuses on professions that take human behavior and interiority as the object of their expertise: social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health. Dually appointed in the Crown School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, she works to illuminate how the helping professions distill historically traceable debates and predominant logics about agency, care, communication, (in)dependence, personhood, presence, science, and truth.

Topics

Featured Project

The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

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2024 – 2025
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Projects

The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

Painting of a humanoid figure against a red/pink background.

The Case of the Human II: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject

Medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being have intersected in recent decades, but the category of “the human” continues to be defined and applied in different ways. This project will identify a more holistic understanding of “the human” that is neither primarily medical nor...
Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from differing perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two ...

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